Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 682
Various
Various
Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 682 / January 20, 1877
HYGEIA: A MODEL CITY OF HEALTH
A remarkable attempt has been made to bring into one focus numerous suggestions put forth, within the last few years by social improvers and sanitary reformers. These suggestions, as our readers are aware, take a very wide range. Matters relating to water-supply, drainage, disposal of refuse, lighting, ventilation, dry foundations and dry walls to houses, stoves and fireplaces, cookery and kitchen arrangements, washing and drying appliances, cleanliness of person and of garments, cleanliness of rooms and of bedding, special arrangements for unwholesome but necessary trades and employments, provision for the sick that may not be perilous to other persons, moderation in diet and regimen, avoidance of vicious indulgences – all these and many other subjects have engaged the attention of thoughtful persons in a marked degree; and it can be indisputably shewn that the annual death-rate is lowered in districts where improvements in such matters have been extensively adopted. Mr Edwin Chadwick, perhaps the chief worker in this laudable direction, is so confident in the eventual success of such endeavours, that he announces the possibility of building a city that shall have any assignable death-rate or annual mortality, from a maximum of fifty or more in a thousand to a minimum of five or less in a thousand. Dr B. W. Richardson, a physician and physiologist of eminence, has taken hold of Mr Chadwick's idea, and sketched the plan of a city that shall shew the lowest rate of mortality. No such city – we need hardly say – exists, and he has neither the time nor the means to build one; but his purpose is to shew that it can be done, whenever public opinion is ripe for it.
Dr Richardson, in an Address to the Social Science Association, afterwards published in a separate form, speaks of his Hygeia or City of Health in the present tense, as if it already existed. This is done for vividness of description and brevity of language, and will be understood by the reader in the proper sense.
Hygeia, then, is a city for a hundred thousand inhabitants. (The main principles could be worked out in a much smaller community, but in a less complete form.) It has twenty thousand houses on an area of four thousand acres of ground: apparently rather densely populated, but not too much so when good sanitary arrangements are adopted. There are no very lofty houses. In busy thoroughfares, where shops are required, there are three stories or floors over the shops; and some of the best streets in private or 'west-end' neighbourhoods have four stories in all; but in others the general number is three. Underground living-rooms and kitchens there are none; instead of these, every house is built upon arches of brickwork, which form channels of ingress for fresh air, and of egress for all that is required to be got rid of. Running along beneath each main street is a railway for the transport of heavy commodities. All the streets are wide enough to admit plenty of cheerful sunlight and fresh air, and rows of trees are planted between the foot-ways and carriage-ways; the carriage-ways are paved with wood set in asphalt, and the foot-ways with stone pavements ten feet wide. Tramways are not permitted, as they cut up the roadway; omnibuses above ground and railways below will suffice instead.
All the interspaces between the backs of the houses are laid out as gardens. Churches, hospitals, theatres, banks, lecture-rooms, and other public or large buildings, follow the same alignment as the houses in the streets, but all detached; and every one flanked by a garden-space, however narrow.
There is no occasion for those unsightly concomitants of London sanitation, scavengers' carts. The accumulation of mud and dirt in the streets is washed away every day through side-openings into subways, and is with the sewage conveyed to a destination apart from the city